Before she made Super Bowl history, before the game even existed, Norma Hunt had to prove her worthiness. She had to try out.

Back then, she was Norma Lynn Knobel, Richardson High School history teacher. Wooing her was Lamar Hunt, American Football League founder and son of one of the world’s richest men.

Early in their courtship, they attended one high school, one pro and three college football games in a four-day span, after which Norma casually said, “I think we went to five games.”

“Isn’t that great?” beamed Lamar. “A fiple-header!”

A mere warmup, it turns out, for Norma, whom the Pro Football Hall of Fame recognizes as the only woman who has attended all 44 Super Bowls.

Number XLV is two weeks from today. For the first time, Norma doesn’t need a plane ticket. The game is at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, a short drive on Interstate 30 from Lamar’s beloved hometown of Dallas.

His specter will be everywhere, even more so than usual, starting tonight in Pittsburgh, when the Steelers-New York Jets winner receives the Lamar Hunt Trophy, symbolizing the American Football Conference championship.

Thus will begin the international countdown to the sport’s ultimate game, bearing the name Hunt coined and the Roman numerals he suggested, in the region that didn’t have pro football until he devoted his life to bring it, finally succeeding in 1960.

Hunt died Dec. 13, 2006, at age 74, of complications from prostate cancer. He was famously modest, never apt to take bows, but he’ll be a toast of the town next week, along with his former Highland Park neighbor, Cowboys owner and Hunt admirer Jerry Jones.

“If my father was here, he would be delighted,” says Clark Knobel Hunt, chairman and CEO of the Kansas City Chiefs, the NFL franchise that Lamar founded as the AFL’s Dallas Texans. “His dream going back to the 1950s was that pro football would work in Dallas.

“There’s been a lot of validation over the last 50 years, but I think having the Super Bowl here maybe puts an exclamation point on it.”

The early days

Though the mild-mannered Hunt played a paternal role, the Super Bowl wasn’t conceived out of love, but, rather, war.

Frustrated by the 12-team NFL’s disinterest in granting Dallas an expansion franchise, Hunt formed a rival league, the AFL, by recruiting owners in seven other cities. One of the NFL’s first countersalvos was to place a team in Dallas, the Cowboys, coinciding with the AFL Texans’ 1960 debut.

Three years later, Hunt reluctantly concluded that two teams could not survive in Dallas, so he moved his franchise to Kansas City. By 1966, the bidding war for top players forced the NFL to offer a truce — merger talks — and an NFL-AFL “World Championship Game.”

Hunt’s Chiefs lost to Green Bay in the first edition, on Jan. 15, 1967. But the words “Super Bowl” weren’t printed on game tickets until the fourth title game, in 1970, in which the Chiefs defeated Minnesota.

In a videotaped interview for the Pro Football Hall of Fame archives, Hunt recalled that he blurted what would become two of the most famous words in sports during a late-1960s NFL owners meeting, amid discussion about whether to have one or two weeks off before the championship game.

“What do you mean, ‘The championship game?’” Hunt recalled hearing, to which he replied, “Well, you know, the final game, the last game, the Super Bowl.”

He later surmised that he must have subliminally thought about the Wham-O Superballs he had seen his children bounce around the house.

Four decades after the fact, Norma claims to have “no importance” in this bit of history. But she is the one who purchased the balls for Lamar Jr., Sharron and Clark at Toy World in Dallas. Clark was an infant and the fourth Hunt child, Daniel, hadn’t been born.

“I was buying some other toys and brought my purchases to the counter and saw this box of balls with a poster behind it, showing the balls being bounced over the house,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. My ball-loving children would just love to have these.’”

The original balls disappeared long ago, but Wham-O shipped replacements, some of which are displayed, still packaged, at the Hall of Fame — in the Lamar Hunt Super Bowl Gallery that opened last August.

“It’s a wonderful tribute to a remarkable man that we all miss,” says NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. One of Goodell’s early jobs in the league office was his 1987 appointment as assistant to the president of the AFC — Hunt.

“His spirit will always be with us,” Goodell says. “Norma and the family are doing a tremendous job carrying forth Lamar’s amazing legacy as a pioneer, founding father and one of the most important architects in the history of our game.”

Extending the streak

To Norma, the natural way to continue Lamar’s legacy is by doing what he most enjoyed — attending games.

In fact, Games was his childhood nickname, earned by playing and studying virtually all sports while his oil baron father, H.L., built a financial empire.

Lamar was fascinated by statistics — most mesmerizing of all, streaks.

On Jan. 1, 1937, 4-year-old Lamar sat on his sister Margaret’s lap at the inaugural Cotton Bowl, the first of 67 consecutive Cotton Bowls he attended.

Clark figures he inherited the “streak disease” from his father. When Clark was 7, he and Lamar began a tradition of running the Dallas YMCA Turkey Trot. Clark estimates his father reached 20 straight Trots, and Clark made it to 25.

Both probably acquired some sort of numbers gene from H.L., a prodigious poker player who could memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards after flipping through it once.

“People who had known Lamar since childhood said he had a calculator in his brain,” Norma says. “I always told him I was sure that’s why he got into all these sports businesses, because he had this brilliant, mathematical mind.”

At SMU, Hunt played end, married sorority sweetheart Rosemary Carr and earned a geology degree in 1956. They had Lamar Jr. and Sharron but divorced soon afterward.

While fighting for the Texans’ and AFL’s survival, Lamar met his sports soul mate. During summers between teaching at her alma mater, Richardson, Norma worked in the Texans’ promotional office.

In a Jan. 15, 1964, Dallas Morning News story announcing their engagement, 25-year-old Norma said of her 31-year-old fiance, “I love Lamar and football, too.”

They married the following week in her parents’ Richardson home, Chiefs coach Hank Stram serving as best man. They honeymooned at the Austria Winter Olympics, starting lengthy streaks of attending Olympics, soccer World Cups, tennis tournaments, Chiefs games and Super Bowls, among other events.

At home, Lamar kept copious records of things such as his daily weight, exercise regimen and how many days annually he spent outside of Dallas. A founding Chicago Bulls minority owner, he also tracked how often he and Norma saw Michael Jordan play in person.

The streaks he seemed to cherish most were not his, but Norma’s. Before one seemingly nondescript Chiefs home game, he led Norma into a barbecue joint near the stadium. She wondered why so many of their friends were there, until she was told that the No. 99 Chiefs jersey hanging from the ceiling signified her attendance streak.

One of a kind

Above all, there was Norma’s Super Bowl streak. Undoubtedly, the Chiefs’ presence in Nos. I and IV and Lamar’s personal ties to the game got the streak rolling.

How personal? Kansas City’s Super Bowl IV opponent, Minnesota, was owned by Max Winter. He had agreed to field the franchise in the original AFL but at the eleventh hour bolted to the NFL.

Super Bowl IV in New Orleans would mark the completion of the NFL-AFL merger. The Chiefs would be the last to take the field as an AFL team, and the NFL held a 2-1 lead in Super Bowls.

“Lamar felt strongly that it was so important for us to win,” Norma says. “To leave it forever tied, 2-2.”

Leaving for the game, Lamar and Norma found themselves on the Royal Sonesta Hotel elevator with Winter and his wife — and no one else.

“We tried to make small talk,” Norma says. “Lamar and I were terror-struck, we’re trying to be polite, and they are, too.

“But when we got off, Lamar looked at me and said, ‘You know what? We’re going to win, because they are more scared than we are.’”

So the Chiefs did, 23-7. They haven’t been back, but the Hunts kept returning. Years became decades, the Hunt children, then their children, sporadically attending.

“I started going on a regular basis about 20 years ago,” says Clark, 45. “My father would always make a point of stopping outside the stadium and having a photo taken with my mother.

“He would always say it was for my mother’s sake, just to prove that she made another one. He was very religious about doing that, which I thought was really cute.”

As the years passed, Lamar polled every NFL team to find out if any of their female staff members had attended every Super Bowl. The NFL and Hall of Fame ultimately determined that only a few league officials, media and fans — none female, other than Norma — had made every game.

But as the 2007 Super Bowl neared, Lamar lay in a Texas Health Presbyterian of Dallas hospital room, barely able to speak. With Norma briefly out of the room, Lamar asked Clark to make sure that he and his siblings got Norma to the next Super Bowl, just two months away.

“He couldn’t bear for me to not make it,” Norma says. “When I heard that, it was like, ‘OK, I’m on board for the rest of this ride, for as long as I can do it.’ It made that first Super Bowl without him special — and difficult.”

Through the years, it became ritual for her to make air and hotel reservations when Super Bowl sites were announced. She was thrilled when Cowboys Stadium was picked for 2011, for personal and practical reasons.

“Absolutely, Lamar would have been thrilled,” she says. “We have to be grateful to Jerry Jones for stepping out there and building what is undoubtedly one of the greatest stadiums in the world.

“I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like driving to the game. I’ve been blessed with excellent health, but I’ve always thought, some year, if the flu strikes, ‘Gosh, that sure would be tough to get on that plane.’

“Now, heck, I can just lie in the back seat of a car and they can drive me out there.”

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